A professional and well-financed conference on Africa held in Geneva was dubbed by organizers as the first African Davos.  It however, failed to attract much attention despite an impressive list of former international leaders including Kofi Annan, Al Gore, Gordon Brown and Bernard Kouchner. 

The “Gateway to Africa”conference[http://www.gateway2africa.org/BYT.aspx] was billed as multi-dimensional approach to bring African and prominent international leaders together to discuss a wide range of issues including health, energy, education and politics. Conference organizers chose not to focus on a single theme with the result that a certain amount of confusion was created among many speakers and their audience. 

There were questions about why the speakers list included, as the only African leader present, Equatorial Guinea’s controversial President, Teodoro Obiang, described by the British newspaper The Independent as “an African despot who makes (Zimbabwe’s) Robert Mugabe seem stable and benign”.

President Obiang’s keynote speech was due to be about “Africa Today and Tomorrow” but as the current chairman of the African Union, he used the occasion to repeat his opposition to ‘foreign interference” in Africa, Lybia and the Ivory Coast.

It was not clear whether some of the speakers understood what conference they were addressing.  Former US President Al Gore, expected to speak about “Thinking Green”, instead spoke about the growing presence of the Internet in Africa. The man once quoted as saying he ‘created the Internet’, perhaps thought he was attending another Geneva conference going on that same week, hosted at The University of Geneva by Tim Berners-Lee, father of the world wide web.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did address that conference about his new pet project - how to use the worldwide web to revolutionize Africa's economy and gave the same speech to the Gateway conference instead of the topic he was slated to address, “Beyond the Crash – the First Crisis of Globalization”. 

The interest in Africa of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s is well known and he may well be looking for a project to replace his Geneva-based NGO, the Global Humanitarian Forum which closed due to financial difficulties last year.

The Africa credentials of former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, are also well established as the founder of Medicines Sans Frontier.  He seemed to know where he was and spoke about the “Challenges in African Health".

However, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who gained renown for his swift reaction to the terrorist attack on his city on September 11, was initially slated to speak on the subject he knows well: “International Cooperation in the War Against Crime and Terror”.  Oddly, he too talked about mobile phone and Internet connectivity.

Another participant who stuck to the agenda was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya who spoke about “Environment, Democracy & Peace: A Critical Link”.  She was the second main African speaker on the agenda, apart from four Ambassadors from the Geneva Missions of Cameroon, Madagascar, Somalia and Uganda who participated in a panel discussion on “Africa, Today and Tomorrow”.

The common denominator among these disparate speakers appears to have been their common interest in encouraging investment in Africa. And while some may be uncomfortable with the Israeli sponsorship, sponsors included giants like Coca Cola and companies involved in environmental and renewable energy projects or health providers specializing in diseases that are devastating Africa. 

As with their counterparts who attend the Davos Economic Forum, the Gateway to Africa conference’s main benefit may simply have been to bring together like-minded world leaders, NGOs and businesses who see Africa as the next emerging global market.